Slashdot Mirror
Difficult Times For SF Magazines
Lawrence Person writes "Another speculative fiction magazine folds: Realms of Fantasy is ceasing publication. This comes hot on the heels of the announcement that the venerable Fantasy and Science Fiction will be moving from a monthly to a bimonthly schedule, and underscores what a tough environment this is for science fiction and fantasy magazines, all of which have suffered declining circulation for quite some time. This is a real problem, since short fiction is generally where new writers cut their teeth, appearing in print alongside their more famous peers. Given that a one-year subscription costs less than the average video game, those with an interest in science fiction might want to consider buying subscriptions to Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Analog. (Those in the UK might want to add Interzone and/or Black Static and Postscripts as well.)"
Maybe people are doing most of their reading on online? Spending too much time on /.?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
i thought they died out in the 60s
adj.
1. Happening every two months.
2. Happening twice a month; semimonthly.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I've been buying Asimov, Analog, and S&SF for a LONG time, but I won't subscribe to them. The extra cost involved if you don't live in the US means it's the same price - or less - to buy it at the local book store. AND, unlike when I *did* subscribe, it arrives at the book store a month earlier. WTF is up with that? What are they doing - taking back the overstock and mailing it out to subscribers?
fanfic is the craigslist of the publishing world.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
... the quarterly earning reports of many companies? (need I mention Satyam)
Subscribe to these magazines. I have particular experience with Analog & Asimov's and the amount of quality stories in each issue is quite high, providing many hours of good reading each month.
I would have never discovered either if it weren't for downloading 'illegal' digital copies via IRC. One of the biggest problems of these magazines is people just don't know, the more exposure they get the better off they will be. I would advise them to freely post a certain number of back issues online to entice potential subscribers. I think they need to re-invent their content delivery model if they want to stay afloat. It would be a great loss if they faded away.
Magazines in general are hurting. Mad magazine also cut down from being a monthly magazine to being a quarterly. It's rival, Cracked, has been doing well because they adapted to the internet (cracked.com vs mad's crappy website).
Sorry guys, it's a brave new world, it's not 1984 anymore. Get with the program.
BTW, I don't read a lot anymore, but besides the odd fanfiction (fanfiction.net), I find fictionpress for original stuff a decent place to read. Perhaps there are others. The problem is (and what magazines with editors used to do) was picking out the gems from the crap. There are various ways to do this on those type of sites, but many still still don't make any effort and dump the whole lot of listings on you.
As an unpublished writer myself, I think what this means is that writers are going to have to get their starts by posting their stories on the Internet. If they write well, perhaps they will build a following, and that will make it easier for them to get published by more regular means (which pay better, but beginners never made that much money anyway).
It is too bad for me that I seem to complete one short story or novella every four years, but that is my own problem... I could always put out the stories I have...
Posting on the Internet is currently easier for novelists than it is for short story writers. Magazines want first serial rights and that means they want to get your story before the Internet does. Book publishers don't care so much about being first as about having exclusivity. So you can put your book out, and if it becomes popular, some publisher might pick it up without you having to write another one. But then book publishers prefer to keep a book in print for a while, if it keeps selling.
It can still work for short story writers to give stories away, but only if they complete stories fairly often. If I could complete a story every month, I could offer it to the magazines first and then put it on the Net. Maybe eventually I would write something good enough that a magazine might decide to catch the next one...
Whether writing is distributed online or in paper form, the author still has to afford to eat and should be able to recieve renumeration for their efforts.
I think this is somewhat due to the way the middle class is being squeezed and there is less spending money than there once was. It may also be due to video games, and that does not bode well for the video game generation who spending their time moving a figure around the screen, and who lack the intellectual and brain development that comes from reading.
This situation mirrors that of what is happening to newspapers. While blogs are the ever so popular fad, most blogs are repackaging stories which are being provided by large media institutions such as newspapers who have well paid reporters. There is some kinds of reporting that can only be done with the kinds of budgets that major media outlets have, like investigations in sometimes dangerous foreign countries. The result of losing this is americans will become even less informed and aware of what is going on in the world, and is this awareness which is essential to the functioning of a democracy, an informed population.
I think the idea of online subscriptions should be done more, maybe sci-fi mags should have a bundled print-online subscription and an online-only subscription.
For newspapers perhaps there should be a national alliance of newspapers, maybe for some additional features or perks, you would pay an online subscription to your local online paper, but that would also grant similar access to all of the other newspapers in the nation as well. The subscription revenue would go to local reporters and to national wire news agencies. This provides newspapers a source of revenue, but retains the benefits of being able to instantly access news stores from around the country via the internet.
Ok, I'm game. I have always loved SF, and read quite a lot of it. I have never got into the magazines, though. Which are your favorites, and why?
Every month, feature a different gorgeous model on the cover with a flower in her hair, as in:
If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
Yeah it's gimmicky, but it's the kind of thing people remember, especially since they have little or no time to read nowadays. Even article summaries.
Ink and paper prices are both way up, and not to mention that mom's charging way more to rent out the basement.
From the summary:
"This is a real problem, since short fiction is generally where new writers cut their teeth..."
A real problem my ass... I'm sure new writers can find a place on the internet all the same. In fact, anyone who really thinks it's a problem should go start a site right now. With the right business model, you could provide the same service to new writers and readers alike. There are all kinds of ways this could be done where writers even get paid.
There is no problem, chill out. Print media is dead, the internet is the new library... or something. Either way, calling this a problem is like when the RIAA thought the internet was a problem for music... but it was really the answer to better accessibility.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Science Fiction isn't even keeping up with Wired, let alone journals. So why bother?
SF, noun - Technologically illiterate baby-boomers writing about a "future" which looks like late 20thC. In space.
> This is a real problem, since short fiction is generally where new writers cut their teeth,
Hello! This is the future calling. You know, the one the SIFI writers have been writing about all this time...?!?
The writers have the web. They can make more selling google ads on any blog site than they ever could have getting published in a low-volume sifi rag.
I don't see this as a "Problem" for anyone except the publisher, and even they were clearly not in it for profit. It's just another example of people rationally abandoning their failed business model for a more high-tech one.
Do this: Grab last year's copies of any of these rags and google some of the authors you find in there. You will find they are not dead, merely transported to another reality.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Jim Baen's Universe - http://www.baens-universe.com/
Always been electronic, and I'll keep this subscription going as long as I'm breathing.
Worth every penny of what they charge and there are membership bonuses. Some of the
best short fiction I can find comes out of this shop.
Fictionwise - www.fictionwise.com Carries Analog, Asimov's and F&SF. I've had
subscriptions to all three since 2000 and intend to continue them until either they
or I fold.
Print may be dead, but these guys publish zero-DRM and I can stuff them into my Palm and
go. That was the approach that got me back into reading science fiction.
There's a "Science Fiction" bookstore near where I live, and they've shifted gradually towards carrying mostly fantasy.
Genuine Science Fiction has always been rather thin on the ground. Doing it well is *hard*. Hal Clement was one who did it well. Larry Niven occasionally did it well. (Known Worlds series incl. Ringworld et seq.)
Currently I only know of Charles Stoss, though there may be others. (I've cut back on my reading a lot.)
But a thing to note is...the Science Fiction book store near me doesn't care the magazines regularly. They can't get the distributors to deliver them. And this is in the SF Bay Area, California, USA. Books they can get, but not magazines.
Unfortunately, in my opinion the quality of the single magazine I followed regularly, Analog(Astounding) has also deteriorated. Significantly. Very significantly. So much so that a subscription is practically a waste of money. (There have been a few periods when I also regularly followed Galaxy or Worlds of If...but those are now decades in the past.)
And it's not that I don't still like good Science Fiction...or even good fantasy. I still buy many books. (*Almost* all of which I count as fantasy of one sort or another...but NOT Science Fiction.)
I wish Randall Garrett had lived. *He* could have written decent Science Fiction in the current age. (He wasn't just the Lord Darcy series. There were long periods when he was the most prolific writer that J.W. Campbell had writing for him...under lots of pseudonyms.) He wouldn't have written the same stories that Charles Stoss writes...and nobody will ever know what he would have written. Sigh.
But, in my opinion, most of the magazines don't really deserve to live. It's a real pity, because the magazines is where authors used to develop their skills. Now ... now there doesn't seem to be any decent place for such development. Which means that the people who can become authors are far fewer.
On line? Who pays for on line? IMHO that only works if you are already a well enough known name that a publisher will pick up your work anyway. (I.e., even if they don't have exclusive rights to distribution.) A few authors can get away with that.
Science Fiction has always been a shoe-string operation. And SF magazines have always been VERY highly dependent upon their editor. A change of editors can make a weak magazine or break a strong one. Astounding/Analog was extremely lucky in having Campbell for so long. Galaxy was lucky in HL Gold. Asimov's ... faded rapidly when he did. I don't think that Stanley Schmidt was as good an editor as Campbell (average rating...Campbell sure had his off periods!), but he was more than adequate. But he didn't keep the spark going. He didn't have the fire that inspires authors and readers. Recently...I haven't been following. Occasionally I see one and pick it up. But rarely...meaning I rarely see one. When I do see one, I'm rarely inspired to buy it.
All magazines are falling off, but Science Fiction magazines have always lived closer to the edge...so any fall off in business affects them more profoundly.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Seriously - back then, Asimov's, Omni Magazine(pity it was too short-lived), Heavy Metal, Analog... I devoured them with the appetite of a starving man in a fully-stocked pantry.
That said, I prefer the online copies - though downloadable would be nice as opposed to strictly online (hint hint). This way I don't have to worry about big stacks of paper, I can carry them all in one go without breaking my back, and being digital, I can search 'em in very short order instead of having to rely on crappy brain cells to hunt down a story that had piqued my interest, but not enough to remember what/where it was in the stack.
Just remember to bring the artwork with you into the digital realm, guys. The artwork makes the whole thing worth the trip. :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
SF ceased to be SF long ago. walk into a bookstore, and you'll see books with a cover of a giant muscular thor-looking dude with a huge sword fighting a dragon. that is NOT SF. that is fantasy. that killed true SF (such as heinlein)
I used to think that print mags would survive as long as there were toilets. Crap, we need something to read while we're in there. But then I started to bring my laptop into the can. I know gross. But you can't beat surfing the net, while doing your business.
I really don't mean to be a troll with this. But I wanted to read RoF in order to see what kind of short stories were being published, and so I subscribed for a year.
Most of the story content during the year I subscribed came across as snooty/snobby artsy fartsy junk fantasy. At least as far as I can recall. I have like, zero standards when it comes to reading science fiction/fantasy so long as I can pronounce the character names without needing a guide, and this stuff turned me off. Seriously, I went through a phase where fantasy stories were like crack, and these guys couldn't publish one story in a year that made me feel like the subscription was worth it.
Maybe some of their problem comes from the fact a bunch of people didn't like the content? Content is everywhere. If you want someone to pay for content, it has to be more entertaining or valuable than they can get for free. I can get snooty art fantasy all I want at deviantart for free.
To believe that this is a "real problem". Yay its very real compared to slashdot inhabitants losing their jobs and their homes.
Seriously, most of us don't give a s***.
Orson Scott Card publishes a great, DRM-free, electronic-only magazine called Intergalactic Medicine Show. They don't publish on a set schedule, so you can't buy a subscription, but you can sign up (for free) to have them email you every time a new issue comes out.
One of the nice things about their lack of schedule is that they don't have any pressure to "fill" an issue and get it to press on time: they collect good stories as they come along, until an issue is truly ready.
Another aspect of this medium which is a bit of a mixed blessing: no page limits. They don't have to cut stories down to size to get them to "fit," which means that they don't have to sacrifice any part of the story. Unfortunately, it also means that they can be less disciplined about their wordiness.
I was reading in my comfortable chair, three feet away from where I'm now typing this.
Am I the only one who still finds it more comfortable to curl up with a book than to read a screen?
I really, really like modern digital stuff as much as any slashdotter out there but a book, or magazine, is still a superior technology in many ways: it needs no power, it's durable, I can stuff it into a pocket and take it with me, I can read anywhere there's enough light, from any position I find comfortable; if I lose it or drop it in the bathtub, no big whoop.
Some of these advantages would go away if I had one of these new-fangled readers, I suppose, rather than the laptop I mostly use but dead trees are still more "user-friendly".
I've read these magazines since I was a kid, and I have subscribed on and off. They have been through good times and bad. F&SF in particular went through a period of being too artsy, but they've been great lately. Reasons for not subscribing: mailing cost to Canada ridiculously expensive, too much paper clutter to store or throw out after you finish reading it, months when I'm just too busy to sit down for a good read. But it seems to me that these magazines are ideal for electronic book readers like the Amazon Kindle. They're already published on small pages without a lot of graphic content, using cheap paper that isn't meant for long-term preservation, and the content is the kind that read once and don't need to keep. Their salvation may yet come.
We don't need sci-fi anymore.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/4409958/Extinct-ibex-is-resurrected-by-cloning.html
I'm an interzone subscriber and I think it's quite good, it could do with more book reviews, but I think it's worth the money. Since the pound has fallen so much it's a good time for all you Americans and Europeans to subscribe.
The problem with this story? RoF deserved to fail years ago. Shawna McCarthy and friends have been publishing the most unimaginative, lame-footed fantasy and milquetoast editorials in the business and made the entire genre look like guilty pleasure mush for middle aged women. Even the barest acknowledgment of slipstream fiction, edgier urban fantasy, or anything genre-bending in the way that moves things forward would have saved them. It has nothing to do with "print is dead" -- it has everything to do with being out of touch with the larger audience.
But, alas, now they're taking down a full-color glossy with street cred. Writers will suffer, regardless of what business model emerges.
The entire magazine distribution system in the United States is about to crumble. Two of the major wholesalers/distributors..Source and Anderson..have decided to up their rates to cover costs. Since they never upped their rates before, like most other companies.
Now the publishers, for the most part, are telling them to go fuck themselves.
Expect to see a major disruption and change in the way all magazines are handled in the US.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Having grown up reading science fiction, I'm now embarrassed to be seen anywhere near that section of a book store.
The sexy tech have changed to "computers" in the 1990s. We watched in wonder at the computer as a magical thing, and that stirred our imaginations. Computer magazines became popular as readers lapped through its pages hungrily, looking for articles that tell the future and stir the readers' imaginations.
The other sexy tech in the 1990s was "biotech", but we techies didn't pay much attention. That was where many new high-paying jobs were created, and biotech graduates entered the industry with long hours but high starting salaries.
FWIW, robotics is still sexy, just that the concepts (A.I. robots) are far too way ahead of its time. We've been waiting for decades for an intelligent robot!
And flying cars too.
Doesn't the sci-fi community realize that Cory Doctorow frequently preaches loud and proud about the only way for an author to behave: give your content away. Then get some rich computer industry guys to pay the EFF for you to tell the world that this is the only solution that is morally acceptable. The computer guys will go for this because they make their money from hardware and they don't understand why the content industry keeps bugging them about piracy when it keeps selling bigger and bigger hard disks. Of course this plan will only support one writer, but that's no matter. The sci fi community should just learn to love the end of the world where people actually pay for content.
who has never bought an SF magaine, I'd be willing to do my part and subscribe to a magazine or two. On the other hand, I've never bought one, so I don't know the differences between them.
So, how are the different magazines positioned? What kind of stories do they publish?
Also, I have elementary and middle school aged kids at home. Which magazines are most kid friendly? We still read together, including relatively mature materials like the Terry Pratchett novels. By kid friendly, I mean interesting to kids. For example, one story I loved at that age was Clifford Simak's The Big Front Yard, which in aside from being a good story, captures something of what the world feels like when you're a inquisitive kid.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
These magazines carry almost no advertising, which is where the money is. Maybe that's because their sales people aren't pushing hard enough. But, I suspect it is really due to poor and declining circulation numbers combined with the widespread assumption that everyone who reads science fiction is an adolescent acne-ridden geek with no money.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I want to subscribe to the mentioned magazines, but since my attention is divided enough as it is already, I'll really only have the time to read one of them. So the question is - which one? Do current subscribers of these magazines have any opinions on if you're just going to get one, which one it should be?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
This shows how bad things are - I haven't seen any of these mags on the magazine stands in years. I thought they had all gone away. I'm glad to know they're still around, and I think I will subscribe (to at least one of them.)
Maybe I'll submit a story!
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
I"m not surprised about this at all. IMO there is possibly one good modern author of Sci Fi - and that's William Gibson.
I've read nearly every major author there is. There are no Farmers, or Zelaznys, let alone Dicks, Lems, Asimovs, Clarkes, Strugatskys, Sturgeons, Heinleins or Bradburys (etc etc - insert another twenty excellent '50s-'70s authors here). LeGuin is still alive but is more of a teacher than an author now.
The fantasy literature still hasn't moved beyond Ged wannabes. But then where are we anyway? The best SF literature there is ( once again IMO) is Borges - and he isn't even classified as SF.
So the genre is filled with shit megavolumes of hack space opera, yet another beggar-becomes-top-wizard, and okay - once in a rare while I get a laugh from Pratchett. Oh whoops - forgot the movie tie-ins. Dr Who, Star Trek, and Star Wars - none of it involves breaking into totally new ways of seeing the world - so it doesn't get my vote. And I wish Gibson would give up on being a futurist, and get back to his wild unconscious imagination. Please, go on Bill - jump a thousand years.
So here is the crisis - if it's good literature then it's not Sci Fi. Therefore, the entire genre is vanishing into hack shit.
There is really such a rich set of opportunities available still - what it means to really be alien - as well as the gadzillion potentials of far flung future.
I am a die-hard SF fan - but after having read every major author from Stapleton, Verne and Wells up to the modern day - I am not feeling good about the future of SF.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
I pretty much agree with you. I've read a shit load of fantasy and s.f. over the years, but as I've gotten older, I've found much of it less satisfying. The truth of the matter as I see it is that a large portion of fantasy/s.f. is akin to those trashy romance books that my grandmother used to read by the hundred. They're geek porn.
Just to be clear, it's not the the entire genres are bad--it's that a lot of what is popular and people read are popcorn fluff. There's still a lot of really good fantasy and s.f. lit out there, it's just not always readily apparent.
Of course a large portion is trashy, see Sturgeon's Revelation: 90% of everything is crap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
Hello! This is the future calling. You know, the one the SIFI writers have been writing about all this time...?!?
Actually most good sci-fi writers were writing about the present, the stories were just perhaps set in the future for narrative effect.
This seems like the perfect use for print on demand, if only the infrastructure was already there. Maybe they can team up with the dying newspaper and magazine industry to make this happen.
Horror writers also have it really hard, and traditionally always have. While recently (within the past few years) horror has experienced an uptick of popularity (especially within the vampire and zombie genres, as unfortunately is shown by Stephenie Meyer's successful Twilight), overall it is extremely difficult to make a living in the horror field.
In one of the past few issues of Cemetery Dance magazine, Brian Keene (an average working-man pulp horror writer with a few novels under his belt) gave a no-holds-barred interview where he basically states that one would have to be pretty insane to attempt entrance to the horror market. He says, about becoming a full-time writer: "Never. Never in a million years. I expected to work in a foundry or a call center for the rest of my life, and occasionally get a poem or story published in some small press fanzine. ... I got incredibly lucky. ... Beyond that, maybe it's because I'm a realist about this. ... I view it as a business." He also talks about how much work he does: "I was writing [two books] at the same time - one book from 6 AM to noon and the other from 1 PM to 6 PM. Seven days a week." Keene's main success is from Leisure, a mass market paperback house, and Bantam, an imprint of Random House.
A lot of horror's survival is dependent on the specialty press, who tend to print limited editions of books that may be hard sells to major publishers. The internet does play a role in this, where fledgling new writers join into groups on forums for support. Brian Keene was also one of these, part of the "Horrornet Cabal", an informal group who met at horrornet.com (now defunct). This group also included mentors like Richard Laymon and Brian Hodge, allowing writers like Tim Lebbon and Tom Piccirilli to rise up from the sludge on the bottom of the 'net.
As an unpublished horror author myself, I like to think I understand the punishing nature of the industry. Keene thinks it's impossible for an author to write a novel in a dark room and have it sell - that self-promotion is a required part of an author's work - and while I'd like to disagree, I'm not sure I can. Like Keene says in the interview, that if you're a mid-list author then you receive none of the publisher's promotional budget and instead your book will sink or swim on the bookrack based on the whims of the masses, you may not have a lot of options for self-promotion. Yet, good writing should stand on its own. I've been writing seriously for two years (I've felt the call for decades) and, while I have my share of rejection slips, I believe the main reason why I've not been published is because I haven't written anything "good enough". An example of this can be found at http://tyrus568.livejournal.com/. Pulp, and pulp in bad form.
Any author knows that being published online by an online mag is only a mediocre step up from nothing. Having your name on a bookshelf or in a print magazine is the defining factor. This may change in the future, but for now, the internet is predominated by wannabe "writers" and hacks.
I am not saying its their, but technology has passed them by. They are asking to cut one or two delivery days a week. I see this progressing to just delivery one or two days a week before its over. Only a few government agencies like the IRS now wont send email.
I generally detest short story fiction unless it is tied into some larger story arc and has continuing characters, e.g. Thieve's World, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser. So if they came up with a game plan along those lines I MIGHT consider subscribing, or IF they published an entire novel in a chapter at a time every publication, sort of like the way Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were originally published.
As they stand now, none of these fiction magazines hold any interest for me, primarily because of my first point.
as a movie? Directed by Ridley Scott? After I stopped shouting 'Yippee!' I was sad, when I realized how bad it would suck. How much will they have to change the plot to make it understandable to the average moviegoer? Goodbye, Time Dilation, hello Explosions.
> But there's a difference between fantasy and science fiction: scifi tries to "explore the human
> condition", while fantasy tries to entertain.
You couldn't be more wrong. The line between Sci-Fi and Fantasy is simply that Sci-Fi makes an attempt to ask "what if" while constrained by the limit that what is proposed COULD possibly be while Fantasy disposes of that limitation. Both should 'explore the human condition' AND 'entertain' if they hope to find success. Lord of the Rings is most certainly fantasy yet asks quite a few questions about the larger moral issues concerning duty, loyalty, power and it's abuse, etc. Meanwhile lots of Sci-Fi doesn't, getting too lost in the tech to remember to relate it back to people and how it might impact US. And then there is the stuff that calls itself Sci-Fi and is just fantasy tarted up with spaceships and rayguns. (I'm looking at you Mr. Lucas.)
Note that you have to give a historical qualifier with my rather strict Sci-Fi definition. If it COULD be when written it counts even if we later learn it couldn't. And it helps to be rather generous and even allow a few things in teh name of artistic license. If the story is ABOUT FTL travel the author is obliged to be exploring a new proposal in that area and talk a bit about the science. But if that isn't what the story is about ya have to let em get away with the usual handwaving about warp|hyperspace|wormholes|etc so they can get on with their story. Because it is still a little early to say FTL is 100% impossible and without it a while bunch of stories aren't possible to tell.
Democrat delenda est
I whole-heartedly agree, do subscribe to Asimov's and Analog. I have an Analog subscription, it varies but most is quite good. The editorials are... amusing. It takes like 4-6 months between the editorial being written to when the magazine arrives, but the editorial writers just CAN'T resist these extremley timing-dependent editorials, that usually make almost no sense by the time the magazine arrives. That's only 1 or 2 pages though.
That said, one OTHER factor that is not helping, I'm sure, is the extreme prevelance of free stories online. There's no editor as in a magazine so some of it SUCKS, but I think there's probably enough good scifi available online I could read it for the rest of my life without running out.
Fantasy & Science Fiction can fuck right off, I've had a few issues and it's almost 100% fantasy. Realms of Fantasy? Guess what, that is fantasy too. Fantasy is not science fiction, I'm not interested in epic quests, dragons, magic, "magick", or demons.
... SIFI writers...
SIFI = System Integration Fiction
"While the migration process was running, I hugged my fellow female technician tight and kissed her passionately. She reciprocated and we locked ourselves in a passionate embrace. I then grabbed her beautiful flowery blouse and unbuttoned her front quickly, almost ripping her blouse open. She stared at me, took a few breaths, and removed the rest of her blouse from her body. I stared..."
I think it's a minor miracle that the print SF/F magazines are still making a go of it. They have always had a precarious fingerhold in the first place, compared to other publications. Nowadays, with major newspapers like The New York Times and Chicago Tribune having a tough go of it, I'm surprised that Asimov's, Analog, and F&SF are still managing print versions. Lately it's all moving online, which is where I expect to see the SF/F zines to eventually migrate.
Some of the online mags seem to be doing well:
Fantasy Magazine (http://wwww.fantasy-magazine.com)
Clarkesworld (http://www.clarkesworldmagazine.com)
Strange Horizons (http://www.strangehorizons.com)
Subterranean (http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/winter-2009)
Farrago's Wainscot (http://www.farragoswainscot.com)
Beneath Ceaseless Skies (http://www.beneathceaselessskies.com)
Fantasy just raised its pay rates, even. They seem to be a bit more adaptable than some of the more outdated magazines.
There's also some pay to read online magazines: Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Jim Bean's.